Through a Camel's Eye Read Online Free PDF Page B

Julie rang her brother, Clive, to tell him about Riza’s disappearance. She’d left messages the day before, which he had not returned.
    â€˜You’ll find him, Sis, don’t worry. He can’t have gone far.’
    Julie began to explain about the fences and the gate, how Riza wasn’t all that big. She could tell her brother was only pretending to listen. She’d cried on his shoulder too often, and this was the result - he made what to him were appropriately sympathetic noises, while his attention was elsewhere. He said the Talbots were having a good time, and that he’d had a postcard from Montpellier. He told her about a soccer match his son had starred in. When Julie felt a scream rising in her throat, she said a quick goodbye.
    When Chris spoke to Clive on the phone, he confirmed what Julie had told him, that it was friends of his who owned the house.
    â€˜They must be well off.’
    Clive said he’d lent his sister the money to buy Riza and that she would pay him back when she could.
    â€˜What does Julie live on?’
    The answer was a disability pension. She’d had some ‘troubles in the past’.
    â€˜So your sister is in considerable debt.’
    â€˜It doesn’t bother her. She’s never had much money.’
    â€˜Or a proper job?’
    â€˜Look, when Julie found Riza and decided to buy him, she was living in a horrible boarding house in Melbourne, with other, other - ’
    â€˜Troubled young people?’
    â€˜I was happy to help out.’
    Chris told himself that he could check with Centrelink, but he believed that Clive was telling the truth. He wondered if Julie had ever lifted a finger to help her brother, and surprised himself by the bitterness of this reaction.
    Still, he suggested that Julie could do with a visit. There was a short silence before Clive said that he would see about it, but he had a young family, he lived in Albury and worked long hours.
    Chris decided to wait until after school before tackling Ben McIntyre and his friends.
    He needed time to think. Normally, he’d do a bit of gardening as an aid to thought, get the old blood circulating. Now he felt embarrassed, knowing what his assistant thought of his hobby, though he disliked the word, and would not, himself, have used it. More than once she’d come across him on his hands and knees and stood there like some princess waiting for him to stand up and address her respectfully. Now he was working himself up into a lather, all because he felt self-conscious getting out his gardening gloves and trowel. And there was that untidy area up the back that he’d been meaning to get to for weeks.
    Anthea came upon Chris with his wheelbarrow full of weeds, and the sweat of a warmer than expected morning slipping along his hairline into his cotton hat.
    She’d taken photographs of Margaret Benton up and down the main street, but nobody recognised her, or admitted to it if they did. He knew he should have taken the photographs himself, but he wanted to involve his assistant, who after all had been the one to find the name.
    Experience had taught Chris that people noticed more than they thought they did; but that while news of a certain kind might travel like lightning round the village, other kinds needed more time to reach him. Especially this was the case if one of the locals looked like getting into trouble. Chris - otherwise a local himself, otherwise perfectly trustworthy and acceptable - might find himself suddenly dropped from the grapevine, swinging free of the gossip he relied on to anticipate trouble.
    It was possible that something of the kind was happening with regard to Margaret Benton. On the other hand, it was possible that she’d never been near Queenscliff, that her coat had got into the sandhills by some other means. Chris had already rung Swan Hill that morning and been told that they were handling it. There was no further news.
    There was that